September 20, 2015 – Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Mark 9:30-37
There’s a long review essay in the latest New Yorker about a new book called Super-Better, by a woman named Jane McGonigal. The idea of the book is that if we just learn to see our lives as video games we can solve all our problems.
Forty two per cent of Americans play video games at least three hours every week, McGonigal reports. In fact, as of 2011, the amount of time people had collectively put into playing World of Warcraft was 5.93 million years. Why not harness all that energy?
If you’re overweight, think of weight as a monster you have to slay. If you’re grieving, think of grief as a warrior you have to battle. Keep hacking away and perfecting your weapons, and keep score, too, and enlist as many allies as you can, and in no time at all your grief will be conquered. This is living “gamefully,” McGonigal says, and it’s the answer to everything. Using the seven principles of what she calls “the SuperBetter method,” you can get “stronger, healthier, and happier.” You can “find a better job, have a more satisfying love life, run a marathon, start your own company, and simply enjoy life more,” we all can, just by making our days into mazes and our minds into joy sticks.
There’s even biochemistry to back this up, McGonigal claims, since studies have shown that when we play video games there are measurable physiological changes in our brains. A work ethic, for example, “is not a moral virtue,” according to McGonigal. “It’s actually a biological condition that can be fostered purposefully through activity that increases dopamine.”
And Jesus just shakes his head. He says, no, no, no.
I’m going to be handed over, and I’m going to be killed, I’m going to die, and only then will I rise, and if you want to follow me, you have to die, too. Life isn’t a game and you don’t win it. You lose it. You put yourself last and you put others first, again and again. You endure the suffering and you endure the uncertainty. You live with it. You enter into it.
Life isn’t a game and you don’t win it. You lose it. You put yourself last and you put others first, again and again.
And then Jesus takes a child, and he places it in our midst, and putting his arms around it, he says, “whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.” Just one.
In this age of constant data collection, in this culture that counts every hit and every viewer, in this time when all anyone ever wants is to go viral, one is nothing. It doesn’t count at all.
But it does.
God doesn’t measure things the way we do–he doesn’t measure things at all–he loves them, he loves them into being, the smallest to the largest, and in a way he loves the smallest most of all, the most fragile, the most vulnerable. We are not just biological machines and virtue isn’t something that can be chemically engineered. No, we are made in the image and likeness of God–every living thing has dignity–which is why as Christians we are compelled to fight for the unborn and the aged and the disabled and the incarcerated and the poor and the oppressed, including the animals and the plants and our fragile planet itself, the air and the water: because each and every thing matters.
God doesn’t measure things the way we do–he doesn’t measure things at all–he loves them, he loves them into being, the smallest to the largest, and in a way he loves the smallest most of all, the most fragile, the most vulnerable.
This is what Pope Francis has been saying, in The Joy of the Gospel and now in Laudato Si, what he has come to America to say. This is what the Church is always saying.
Maybe I’m thinking about this because lately I’ve been exploring social media myself, finally, as a way of doing ministry, and Barb and I broke down and finally bought smart phones. And we love them. They’re so useful and fun, and they feel so good in the palm of your hand. They must be designed that way, just physically.
But that’s exactly the danger. We have to keep reminding ourselves: we don’t hold God in the palm of our hands. He holds us. We can’t make him appear and we can’t swipe him away.
That’s the difference between a smart phone and a crucifix—this wonderful crucifix, hanging here: the cross doesn’t shrink things down, it opens them up. It explodes them forever.
That’s the difference between a smart phone and a crucifix—this wonderful crucifix, hanging here: the cross doesn’t shrink things down, it opens them up. It explodes them forever.
Last week I drove up to Spokane to help my brother with our dad, who has moved into an assisted-living facility, and it was really sad and really hard. Dad is so stooped over now. His knees are bad. He has trouble walking. And more than that, he’s losing his mind. He wasn’t completely sure what my name was, though he knew I was one of his sons, and he kept repeating himself, and the big problem—the thing that’s really worrying us–is that he keeps getting lost. He can’t find his way back to his room.
If life is a game, my dad has lost it, as someday we all will. He can’t even play.
We’re not all 15 year-old boys, as the culture of gaming seems to assume. Some of us are 85.
And all I wanted to do was jump in my car and turn on my audio book and blast down the freeway, back home, to my own cozy life in Corvallis. I didn’t want to face that darkness.
But if I had driven away, my Dad would have suffered, and my brother would have suffered.
I didn’t do much, really–hardly anything. My brother is doing the lion’s share. He’s doing the heroic work. But that’s the point: he’s doing the work.
Living gamefully is a fantasy. It’s a way of turning away from the darkness and the complexity we have to face, and this is how oppression happens, this is how the planet dies, this is how the body of a little boy gets washed up on a beach, when we escape into the fantasy of winning instead of dying to ourselves and rising into service, service to the world, service to others, service to God. The problem with the idea of winning is that someone has to lose.
What Jesus offers is a way of winning in a whole different sense.
The winning in a video game isn’t real, it’s only virtual, but the winning in Christ, in reality, is genuine and lasting. If we can endure the darkness, if we can endure our own powerlessness, if we can just live with the facts—the fact of the suffering around us, the fact of our culpability—our sorrow and our fear and our boredom will finally give way. We will rise. We will rise into a humility. We will rise into a kind of sober joy. We won’t be playing a game anymore. We’ll be entering into a true story, the truest of all, the story of the Passion. We’ll be joining Jesus on the way to the cross, and in the tomb, and then in the joy of the resurrection, a resurrection into a new gentleness and compassion completely at odds with the culture of gaming and the culture of data and the culture of death–a culture we do have to keep fighting, we do have to battle, every day.
If we can endure the darkness, if we can endure our own powerlessness, if we can just live with the facts—the fact of the suffering around us, the fact of our culpability—our sorrow and our fear and our boredom will finally give way. We will rise. We will rise into a humility. We will rise into a kind of sober joy.
But we don’t join this battle by sharpening our broadswords. We join it by surrendering. We join it by releasing ourselves into the mercy and love of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is with us always—with my father in his fear and confusion, with your fathers and your mothers, with you and with me—who is with us always, especially in our times of sadness and loss, especially when we have been beaten, especially when we can no longer hold ourselves apart from the suffering and the sadness and the beauty of the world.